Be BuzzFeed’s Product Design Intern This Summer!
Internships come in many flavors, from the big companies that provide a first-hand view into how Product Design operates at scale through huge intern cohorts, to the tiny startups with more ad hoc, self-directed approaches. At BuzzFeed we’re somewhere in between. We’re limited in how many interns we’re able to take on — last summer there were two, previous years we’ve had only one. As a result, every intern becomes a very real and valuable member of our team, tackling high-impact design problems and collaborating with Designers, Engineers and Product Managers across the company.
In addition to seeing how a tech and media organization operates at scale you’ll also get to be a full-time member of the Product Design team, receiving feedback on your work in bi-weekly critiques, workshopping your design ideas as part of Study Halls (run by senior designers), receiving design direction from your Design Manager and even having a dedicated design mentor to ask questions to.
BuzzFeed’s intern program means you won’t be alone! You’ll get to meet and work with a bunch of interns across the tech team and beyond. Oh and did I mention fun? Obviously, BuzzFeed is a very serious organization where there is no fun ever—especially not spinning on chairs, cruising around Manhattan on a sailboat, participating in our annual hackweek or taking a break from work to play a game at BuzzFeed’s summer carnival.
What you’ll work on
Things move quickly at BuzzFeed so projects that exist now will look very different by the time NYC warms up. As a result it’s impossible to know now exactly what you’ll be working on. What we can say is that it’ll be valuable, high-impact work that contributes to our company and audience in very tangible ways. Recent interns have worked on things such as a consumer-facing infographic creation tool, an Alexa skill, a tool for helping track our annual review process and UI improvements to BuzzFeed’s core quiz-taking experience and our Tasty iOS app.
Still unsure what to expect? Perhaps our interns from last summer can provide a bit more insight:
“I got to build a product from A-Z over the summer. That was pretty epic, and even more so was being surrounded by and getting feedback from really talented designers . I love(d) BuzzFeed so much that I ended up staying on full time!” — Noga Raviv
“I had the chance to learn about so much from not only an immensely talented design team, but also data scientists, developers, PMs, and upper level management. The company really gives you flexibility to work on products/teams that interest you and makes you feel like an integral part of the team. It truly was amazing and I can’t speak enough about the quality of the people there. I also had the chance to be in a BuzzFeed video which was really cool.” — Derrick Ho
What we’re looking for
Our expectations for interns are similar to what we’d look for in associate designers, details of which are documented in our roles doc. A portfolio that demonstrates at least one in-depth Product Design project—we favor quality over quantity—with details of the process you went through and artifacts created along the way is often the easiest way for us to understand your capabilities and how well they suit how BuzzFeed operates. We’re most interested in raw Product Design talent and evidence of designing products within real-world constraints i.e. deeply understanding user needs, business goals and technical limitations. We understand many candidates won’t have extensive in-house work experience, but respect creative approaches to meeting the criteria above through self-initiated projects or other means.
The Application Process
Feb 4— Portfolio submission deadline
We know, this is soon! On Feb 5, Design Managers will start reviewing all applications to date, reducing to a short list of the most promising candidates.
February — Interviews
Our initial conversation will last about 30 minutes and focus on your hard skills i.e. User Experience, Visual Design, Prototyping and Front-End code. We’ll ask you to walk us through a project that clearly communicates these things along with the design process you went through for it. This conversation will happen with a Design Manager over video chat.
For those who successfully complete the first interview you’ll have another 30 minute conversation with someone else on the Product Design team to understand more about your interest in BuzzFeed, what you’re looking to learn from the summer and how you think BuzzFeed will help you with this. This second conversation focuses on how well suited this pairing could be, in addition to following up on any open questions resulting from the first interview.
March — Finalize candidates
Following these interviews Design Managers will re-group to compare notes and finalize the most well suited candidates. After making an offer we’ll communicate with everyone who applied to let them know we’ve reached the end of our process for the year.
And finally, internship specifics
You’ve made it this far—awesome! Before going any further please make sure to read the following requirements:
- You must be available to be onsite in our NYC office June 4–August 10 (10 weeks). You’ll be part of a wider BuzzFeed internship program so we can’t adjust the timeline significantly.
- You must be legally eligible to work in the US.
- You’ll be paid fairly, inline with tech industry intern standards.
- We’re unable to offer a housing stipend.
- We know Designer is a broad term — we have graphic designers, brand designers and editorial designers on staff! For this internship we’re only considering Product Designers i.e. designers with evidence of User Interface and User Experience work for software products.
All that’s left to say is:
Feb 5, 2018 Update—We’re No Longer Accepting Applications
